When confronted with the simple fact that men hold the overwhelming majority of positions of power in the world – in government, business, culture, and pretty much everything else – MRAs like to pretend that the actual gender of those in power makes no difference because, well, the men in power are probably a bunch of manginas doing the dirty work of the women who really run the world. Or something like that.
Indeed, some MRAs have even managed to convince themselves that the very basic historical and sociological fact that men in power, by and large, tend to represent men’s interests more than women’s interests is some sort of locical fallacy – something that they’ve labeled “The Frontman Fallacy.”
Now A Voice for Men contributor and YouTube videoblogger TyphonBlue has done these guys one better in terms of sheer antifeminist loopiness. In the comments on one of the Warren Farrell protest videos I recently wrote about, she argues that men in power don’t really push male interests because … they probably don’t even think of themselves as men.
Here she is, writing under her other nom-de-net Genderratic:
I don’t even know what to say to this. I mean, WHAT?!
PROTIP: You’re not going to convince anyone you’re a great ally of trans* people if you refer to them as “it.”
“…just don’t forget to take your meds…”
And you managed to get some ableism in there too, dude! Kudos!
They just wouldn’t be MRAs if they didn’t try to throw as many men under the bus as possible.
@clairedammit
*shrug* Naked ladies attract viewers. Alternatively, perhaps the aliens are turned on by your bath fixtures.
@clairedammit – I read that as spinach echidnas!
I missed Clarence? Aww crap. And what got into him? That’s some rather strong piss and vinegar he was showing compared to what’s normally seen on FC.
The only good use of “did you forget to take your meds?” is this, and mostly for the talking microphone and other talking things.
Kitteh, I’m not too sure what I’d do with a spinach echidna. Let it run around in the back yard, I guess. Maybe it will make friends with the vegetarian chupacabra that lives there. And the spiders!
Introducing self: Hi, all. I’m Tina. Been lurking for about 3 weeks. I’m a mom, wife, Rob Zombie fan and cat lover.
Would anyone here be able to explain what “cis” means…in plain english? Please?
You may all be aware of this little book, but allow me to recommend a lovely book, Misogyny, A Brief History, by the late Irish-American journalist Jack Holland.
screen, it means the body you were born in matches the gender you are. The opposite of being trans*
Hi Tina.
Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisgender
Or maybe the aliens ARE your bath fixtures. The spider-cameras are just a front!
Welcome Tina!
They sell aliens at Home Depot?
It’s part of the aliens’ cunning plot to infiltrate ALL teh bathrooms.
I don’t want a shower head that’s disappointed in me. 🙁
Clarence: And by the way, I don’t need viagra – so how this benefit me?
Nice movement of the goalposts. Now it has to benefit you, not, “men”.
As to the I wasn’t aware that insurance policies coverage of Viagra was mandated by law.
I was unaware of people trying to make it legal to refuse medically mandated drugs (e.g. Viagra/Cialis) to men who need them, in the same way that people are moving to make it possible for any pesonn in a gatekeeping to impose their beliefs on women in the form of denying drugs their doctors prescribed.
See the, “personal conscience” laws regarding making it legal for pharmacists to not dispense BC. No other drugs are so excepted.
Ergo, the law requires prescriptions of Viagra to be filled, but not a woman’s BC.
Care to concede?
And seriously: being allowed to go and take biggest risks in the army so that one man in the army out of several thousand can become a General easier than a woman is a freaking PRIVILEGE?
Oo! As a member of the military I can answer that.
Yes. Even in peacetime being in a Combat Arms branch, at some point, is a HUGE multiplier in the realm of advancement in the Army. It’s also one in the AF: because it’s almost impossible to make that second star if one wasn’t a fighter jock.
In the Navy one has to have command of a Carrier to make Rear Adm. Upper Half.
That’s in peacetime. And you are flat out ignoring that women are serving in combat, and being denied the recognition.
That means the law (whether you think someone who wants to be in the Army, and accepts the risks; and therefore might not see those, “biggest risks” as a the negative aspect you imply it to be, is rational) is advantaging men over women.
Ergo, you are, QED, wrong.
Glad I could clear that up for you.
p.s. the conscript that never even wanted to be in the army in the first place?
That conscript would have to be… at least 58 years old, since the last person who was drafted into the US Army was in 1972. If he is still in service, he made it a career.
Nepenthe: Is the male only draft still law in the USA or is it not?
It is? Then shut the fuck up.
By the way, I suggest you look into “stop loss”. It’s basically a draft without being called one and guess which sex is most affected by it?
See above re actual conscription.
As to stop loss… it’s impossible for it to affect more women than men, not because of some mystical hate on for women, but because the Army is 85 percent male.
So, in actual fact, it affected women more than men.
Stop loss is a freeze on discharge, based on MOS (i.e. the job one does for the army). It’s based on critical skills.
Those critical skills are almost always in support MOS. Since women are, in proportion to their relative membership in the Army, over-represented in those support MOS, they are also affected a a higher rate in those stop-lossed. It’s also the case that the critical MOS stop lossed (such as mine, Interrogation, and medical ones), tend to be jobs which have an even higher over-representation than is the mean for the Army.
The only times this isn’t true is if/when a General Stop Loss is enacted (which hasn’t happened recent memory).
Again, that means the exclusion of women from Combat MOS is a law which advantages men over women.
Feel free to name those laws that benefit women at the expense of men. I am sure it will be most illuminating.
I’ll name one that existed in Victoria until recently (though of course, Clarence won’t think that matters, since he wasn’t affected by it) – the provocation defence. Men literally got away with murder on the claim that women “provoked” them by doing terrible things like leaving relationships, or speaking, or just not being interested in them. Stalkers and abusers with years-long histories of violence successfully used that defence (you might Google Vicky Cleary’s story for that). It was only a few years ago that the law was repealed.
(That’s a law that benefitted men over women, of course, not the other way around.)
@Kitteh’s Unpaid Help: I believe a law like that still exists in Brazil. A man who murders a woman has the benefit of an affirmative defense of “provocation”, that, if successful, gets him a mere four-year sentence. Women who murder other women or men do not have the benefit of such a defense.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all, Amused. It took a public outcry after yet another abuser murdered a woman and claimed (lying) that she’d provoked him by saying he was lousy in bed. The years of abuse he’d dealt out during the marriage, things attested to by her family and friends, were pretty much ignored. From The Age at the time:
“The jury was told that James Ramage was controlling but heard little detail about what form this took. Jurors did not hear how he had head-butted Julie early in their marriage, breaking her nose and blackening her eyes. Or of the many times she told people she feared he would kill her. Or about her claims to friends that he routinely demanded sex from her, insisting even when she was reluctant.
“To lead evidence of the sexual contact — that he treated her like a piece of meat when they were intimate — is not relevant to anything, in my submission,” Ramage’s lawyer told the judge.”
The bastard only went down for manslaughter – he punched her to the ground and strangled her, oh, no intent to kill there, noooo. And he’s already out, he served less than EIGHT YEARS.
Amused: But Brazil doesn’t count because we’re not in Brazil!
[SARCASM SARCASM I DO NOT BELIEVE THIS]
I missed mansplaining? Well, gosh darn it.
When I don’t know too much about a topic, I am very, very embarrassed to have to talk about it.